Lower Dens

Jana Hunter, leader of brooding art rockers Lower Dens, talks about the more immediate sounds of her band's forthcoming third album, Escape From Evil: "We didn't want to try to write about being miserable while being miserable anymore."

Late last year, Jana Hunter tweeted, "culturally, our inability to speak and confront honest emotions, no matter how intense, is one of our most problematic issues." Amid the typical over-excited social media onslaught of nonsense, links, and cynicism, it was the kind of simply stated, ruefully reflective sentiment that could practically stop your feed cold. But while Hunter provided no additional context for what triggered that thought at that particular moment—perhaps because Twitter is hardly the ideal platform to engage in the sort of intensive dialogue she’s seeking—after you listen to her band’s upcoming, uncharacteristically frank third album, that Tweet could easily serve as its roll-out marketing slogan.

After twoalbums powered by dreamy guitar drone and blurry motorik motion—a deliberately obfuscating response to Hunter’s formative years as a Devendra Banhart-mentored avant-folk raconteur—Lower Dens’ Escape From Evil sees a new version of the Baltimore band. They’ve reined in their psychedelic sprawl, refashioning it as succinct synth-pop. And despite a painfully protracted, multi-city recording process, the album counts as the band’s most confident, unified, and accessible work to date. It’s a disarmingly direct record, one whose crystalline presentation and anthemic ascensions only accentuate the painful confessions and uncomfortable apologies embedded within. Though it’s placed front-and-center in the mix, Hunter’s voice remains a captivatingly ambiguous instrument, at once optimistic and defeatist, desirous and desperate, vulnerable and vindictive.

Following a year that had Hunter playing a slate of well-received solo guitar/laptop gigs, coaching at the Girls Rock Camp in her former home city of Houston, and transforming what began as a "mess" of a Lower Dens record into a clean machine, the frontwoman was busy making absolutely no plans for the holidays when we spoke in December.

Pitchfork: On social media, you’ve been very outspoken about the issues that are important to you—from Ferguson to LGBT matters—and that seems to dovetail with the more honest mode of expression heard on this new record.

Jana Hunter: There’s no strategic coordination going on but, obviously, they’re going to be parallel. If anything, it’s an indicator that what I’m thinking about is also what I'm writing about in music. It’s a constant process. I started to really get into Twitter in the lead-up to releasing Nootropics [in 2012], and back then I was following a lot of people who were writing about transhumanism and technology. I was tweeting a lot about stuff like that, and that continued into the release of the record and tour. I don’t remember when it changed, but there was an evolution toward more personal issues and beliefs, things close to my heart.

Pitchfork: You tweeted earlier this year that you always lose followers when you write about social-justice issues. Are you surprised by that?

JH: It doesn’t surprise me. There are artists I admire who I sometimes wish I didn’t know as much about.

Pitchfork: The album is called Escape From Evil—is the evil you’re escaping from within you, or is it about external forces that you can’t control?

JH: Both. There are things inside me that I’m working on, which have dogged me for a long time. I’m also thinking about where we’re at in our society, where we’re constantly trying to better ourselves. It seems like we’re only recently begun to be honest with ourselves in a way where we could pull ourselves out of the downward spiral we’ve been in for so long.

"There are artists I admire who I sometimes
wish I didn’t know as much about."

Pitchfork: Was there any particular environmental calamity that inspired the new song "I Am the Earth"?

JH: No, that is a personal calamity. The song was originally called "The Apology"—I was trying to summon my own experiences in past relationships where I knew I owed somebody an apology for things I had done that hurt them really badly. When I was working on this record, I was still in a place where it was easy for me to deny my responsibility. I put the ultimate distance between myself and those experiences, like, what if I just experienced this life—and sometimes I do—not as the center of the universe, but as a wholly isolated entity in space. The worst part of me wants to consider other people as fleeting and temporary and debris. So it’s really a song about trying and failing to confront your personal responsibility, and failing to acknowledge that you’re accountable for being part of a community.

Pitchfork: Thematically, the new album makes for an interesting complement to Nootropics, which explored matters of technology. The subject matter here, by contrast, feels more rooted in the natural world.

JH: The subject matter is rooted in real relationships. If there’s a connection between this record and our first two, it’s that there’s still a determination to figure yourself out within a wider context, which is really the experience of being human. I’m just trying to be more honest with myself about the fact that I never really had it figured out enough in my personal life to be able to see what was going on in a much larger context.

"This has been a real winter band the whole time:
overcast and dark. But four years of it was just too much."

Pitchfork: You bounced all over the country to make this record—was changing locations part of the master plan?

JH: No. We did writing sessions in Baltimore, and then I took a long time with the songs by myself in other parts of Maryland. For the first recording session, me and our drummer Nate [Nelson] went to Dallas and tried some recordings with [producer] John Congleton. We kept a couple of those things, but I wanted to work with the band and go for a different sound. We ended up going back to the studio in Baltimore where we recorded Twin-Hand Movement, did all the basic tracking there, and then [producer] Chris Coady and I got together in New York, and overdubbed a lot of stuff, and did some initial mixing. Then his studio closed and he moved to Los Angeles. So, for the final mixing, he was in L.A. streaming things to me in Maryland over the Internet and I was typing in GChat, like, "Turn up the bass!" It was like a sitcom/comedy of errors—only everything turned out great.

Pitchfork: Did seeing the crossover success of your Baltimore peers in Beach House and Future Islands make you more open to the idea of crafting a more straight-forward pop album?

JH: I don’t know. It’s always hard to pinpoint what the influences are musically. While I’m working on a record, I try to listen to as little music that could have an influence as possible. We’ve been working on this record for a couple of years, and I mostly I listened to classical music and experimental jazz during that time—things that aren’t going to influence what I’m working on, because I’m incapable of translating elements of those things into our music.

Our first writing sessions for this record were in February 2013, and they were difficult. We hadn’t played together for a while, and we were in a cold, dark space—physically and emotionally. At the end of our two and a half weeks together, we had the work, but we were also miserable. We took a month break, and during that time, [bassist] Geoff Graham and I had been talking a lot about how we didn’t want to try to write about being miserable while being miserable anymore. It sounded awful. We wanted to have a good time and for things to be less complicated. That was the foundation of trying to remove a lot of the philosophical complications—to simplify the songs and make them more honest and direct and vocal-based.

Pitchfork: Based on what you’re saying, it was really just a matter of getting out of the winter.

JH: Probably. With each one of our records, we’ve toured and worked on them a lot in the winter. This has been a real winter band the whole time: overcast and dark. But four years of it was just too much.